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$3.2 million Cash Injection for Australian Mathematics

Leaders of Australia's mathematical sciences community today welcomed the announcement of a major Collaboration and Structural Reform grant to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI). AMSI Director, Professor Philip Broadbridge, said: "AMSI has established a unique collaborative venture. This grant will enable us to continue to grow and expand our programs that are critical to
industry, innovation and product quality. "Maintaining capacity for innovation and research is dependent on building Australia's base in mathematics and statistics which has been declining for some time," Professor Broadbridge added. Dr Jim Lewis, Chair of the AMSI Board, said he was delighted with the news. "As a former senior executive in the resources industry, I am very conscious of the value
of mathematics to the mining and manufacturing industry. Australian education, research and industry need AMSI and the superb expertise it brings together in its ventures. This support is most welcome acknowledgment of the important role mathematics plays in own right and as a foundation enabling discipline." Chairman of the National Strategic Review of Mathematical Sciences Research Working
Party, Professor Hyam Rubinstein, also welcomed the news. "We found overwhelming support for AMSI during the Review and funding for it was one of our two priorities," said Professor Rubinstein. "With this announcement, and the increased funding for the teaching of mathematics and statistics in the May budget, universities should now be in the position to address a national need for more
mathematics and statistics graduates." A further $1.2 million has been awarded to AMSI member, the University of Sydney, to enhance collaborative mathematics and statistics advanced course delivery across universities using Access Grid Rooms (AGR). The AGRs have been partly funded through the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics (ICE-EM), which is managed by AMSI and
funded by DEST.

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BA Festival of Science - Day 4

Another evening, another function, this one sponsored by the More Maths Grads programme. Dr Reidun Twarock, to whom I spoke earlier in the day, gave her talk on viruses and symmetry, possibly the most interactive maths I have seen. Icosahedrons made from cardboard and real footballs were thrown into the audience to help explain her mathematical concepts, and the talk was followed by a brief function in which the More Maths Grads people promoted their activities.

Journeying in this morning, I regretted somewhat the dodgy Yorkshire fish and chips I had the night before. I attended a press conference on studies conducted by the University of Bristol that suggests that not only is there trace evidence of drug usage on nearly every UK bank note in circulation, but that the notes circulate quickly enough throughout the country that no particular area has higher instances of drug use on their notes. Cocaine was found on nearly every note, whilst heroine is found on around 5%. The presence of the drugs is not simply because notes are used in drug-taking activities - even fresh new notes have some contamination because they are contaminated very early on through contact with infected notes. Cocaine is particularly sticky, and so only very brief contact can contaminate a note.

The next press conference was from Professor Terence Cosgrove from Revolymer, who has developed a non-stick chewing gum. More to the point, he was at pains to note that it is not "non-stick" but rather "low-adhesive". He has made the chewing low-adhesive by introducing a patented polymer that has hydrophilic ends, and so will wash off the pavement with water.

I spent the afternoon chatting to Plus editorial board member Chris Budd about all sorts of mathematical issues - mainly that of Euler and the role of maths in the food and drink industry. But we also touched on mathematics communication, period costumes, maths in crime solving and maths in Celtic and African knots and art. You can hear all this on the podcast very shortly.

Unfortunately my time at the BA Festival of Science is coming to an end. I am about to head into York for a session entitled "How maths changed my life" followed by the last train back to London. I certainly look forward to attending the 2008 version in Liverpool.

The BA Festival of Science - day 3

The evening of day 2 promised to make day 3 of the science festival very long for night-owl science journalists. I attended the Association of British Science Writers reception, which was a great affair - hardly surprising given the £400 bar tab, unlimited wine on top of this and free food. It was great to meet some well-known British science writers from UK newspapers, and observe the drinking habits of others!

My first stop on day 3 of the Science Festival was to speak to Dr Quentin Atkinson, a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading, about his research into the evolution of Indo-European languages. He used statistical modelling techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology to date the age of the Indo-European language family and so test between the two main competing theories of Indo-European origins - that of the Kurgan horsemen and of the Anatolian farming hypotheses.

The modelling involved the use of Bayesian networks and instead of looking at how a gene might have evolved over time, he looked at certain words across the Indo-European languages and found where splits between language groups might have occurred. He looked at 200 words such as "mother", "father" and "rain" across 87 languages and found that the original Indo-European language split around 8700 years ago.

I interviewed Dr Reiden Twarock of York University on the geometric properties of viruses. This is the headline mathematics event of the festival, and tonight is accompanied by a reception sponsored by the More Maths Grads project. Dr Twarock is a thoroughly lovely and engaging lady who is using group theory and geometry to build models of how viruses form. These mathematical tools allow her to zoom in on the mechanisms responsible for virus structure and assembly. The resulting insights can then spark new ideas for the development of new anti-viral drugs. This interview will inform future news and features on Plus.

Throughout the day I chatted to a number of people regarding their posters, including some about optimisation, train timetabling, mathematical modelling of sun-spots and Bayesian modelling of Pacific Island cultural movement. These, again, will all appear as Plus news items.

Lastly I chatted to Dr Anthony Sudbery about all sorts of topics with regard to quantum computing. Parallel worlds, unbreakable codes and entangled particles were just some of topics that I pretended to know about ... .

So, now I'm off to rest my brain and then attend the mathematics function tonight. Watch our podcast and news feed for more information on these above topics over the next few weeks.

BA Festival of Science - days 1 and 2

The
BA Festival of Science is the UK's foremost celebration
of science, engineering and technology and its impact on our
society. This year the festival has made its way to York, and
I (Marc West) am here on behalf of Plus to enjoy the
sciencey goodness and bring you
the latest news from the world of mathematics.

The festival is not solely based on maths -
indeed, talks and events focusing on maths alone are few and
far between, and certainly none of the activities on the
first 2 days of the conference centred on it. This does not
mean, however, that maths has played no part in the
talks.

I spoke to former UK Olympian, and now Professor at
Liverpool John Moores University, Greg
Whyte about his research into
the limits of human performance. You will hear this interview
when the next edition of the Plus podcast is
released. He was tempted into this work in part because of
what he called a "ridiculous" piece of work published in the
esteemed journal Nature in the 1990s.

This work postulated that come the year 2050, women would
be running as quickly as men, and would then power on past
and run even quicker, leaving men in their wake. The
reasoning behind this statement was fairly simple. If you
plotted the speeds of world record runs by females in the
1500 m, and then plotted the same graph for the males, linear
regression on both sets of data would result in their
trendlines crossing near 2050.
This was because the decrease in the women's world record has
been comparatively more than the
men's.

A view of the data, and a slight amount of lateral
thinking spots the mistake. To start with, it is not a
surprise that the female world record speed should fall by
more than the men's given that females take longer to run the
distance. Secondly, linear regression is completely the wrong
type of fit for the data. Professor Whyte
fitted a polynomial "s" curve, which showed that the period
in which the greatest amount of change made to the world
record speed was in the 1960s and 70s - he postulated that
this was because of drug usage among athletes.

Whyte also performed his
modelling on other running distances and on swimming speeds
and found that over almost all distances the difference
between males and females remained at around 10%.

Other events that I have
seen include a performance by children's science author Nick
Arnold, and a talk hosted by Professor Robert Winston about
his life. I was intrigued to know he dabbled
with the idea of becoming a theatre director after
university. He was passionate in his arguments that IVF
has now been priced far too highly by private companies
making a large profit. His current research is looking into
genetically manipulating large animals so that their organs
can be used in humans.

I am now off to enjoy one of the many parties and
functions that the "press badge" gets you in to!

The Illusion of Wealth

Imagine that one day you were greeted by your boss at work and told that you had been given a 100% pay rise because of your sterling efforts. Later that day, your bank calls to let you know that your savings and investments have doubled overnight due to an odd fluctuation in the international financial markets. But just when you thought that all your years of hard work had finally paid off,
you discover when buying your groceries that evening that the price of food and drink has also doubled – but that does not matter too much, this is just a small increase.

Are you in a better position than you were the night before? Even taking into account the rise in your cost of living, your net savings have increased, so should you be thanking your boss and your bank manager?

Whilst you may feel wealthier in this situation, this is simply an illusion. You still have to work as many hours tomorrow as you did yesterday to buy your groceries – nominal values have risen, but not real values.

Economists have long considered that financial markets limit the impact of traders trading on nominal values – irrational traders. This is because it is assumed that they are taken advantage of by smarter traders. However, new studies by Jean-Robert Tyran of the University of
Copenhagen have shown that there are situations in which money illusion can have a massive impact on the market, especially when there is a fall in nominal values.

An interesting example is the housing market. When interest rates are low, monthly nominal interest payments on mortgages are low compared to the rent on similar properties, so people start to buy. However, if inflation is decreasing, whilst current payments on the mortgage are falling, the real cost of future mortgage payments is increasing. This is because your salary is not growing and it
will take you longer to pay off your debt. These investors have fallen for the illusion. They are similar to those who pay off their credit card bill with monthly payments over 24 months, instead of over 12, as the down-payments are smaller.

Tyran’s experimental studies show that if there is a monetary contraction within the market – that is, if the nominal costs of goods and services fall – firms are reluctant to follow suit and cut their prices as this would result in lower nominal profits, even if their real profit would remain the same.

This is called nominal loss aversion and results in part from the fact that our inbuilt fear of losses tends to outweigh our desire for a gain of the same amount. It can be seen in other financial areas, such as employees accepting a nominal pay increase, even if it results in a real pay-cut if it does not match inflation. Another example is a homeowner
being more unwilling to sell a house at a real loss if it comes with a nominal loss rather than cloaked by a nominal gain.

Conversely, the experiments show that firms have no problem increasing their nominal prices should there be a rise in inflation and wages to maintain their real profit.

Laboratory work is often based on simplified economies, whilst interpretation of real data can be extremely difficult, so Tyran hopes that experimental research, combined with real observations of the market, can be used together to better understand money illusion.

Are you an emerging engineer, mathematician or scientist who doesn't have the support of a school, university, or other research organisation? Then the Spirit of Ramanujan project might be able to help.